Water and Electricity: Who Needs ‘Em?

As we are slowly coming to realize, water and electricity, although available in most rural villages, is not always the most consistent. When we first arrived at our site at the end of September, both were working about 90% of the time. However, with the arrival of the spring season, water and electricity have become increasingly sparse. Our water taps have produced less and less hours of running time each day and have finally settled at only working from the hours of 9pm to 6am with longer hours after a heavy rain. We are still in the process of figuring this out, as it appears that our house and the other eight or so around us are the only ones in the village who seem to be having this problem. We will walk by other houses in the middle of the day that have all their outdoor taps overflowing with water and wonder how this can be when we have to wait until 9pm to wash our breakfast dishes. It’s all part of the adventure and our troubles have been eased considerably by the purchase of ‘big blue’, our huge water barrel that now resides in the kitchen next to the sink. We are now prepared for water shortages of up to a week, depending on how badly we want to smell.

The electric operates at the whim of the weather. It seems to cut out every time it gets windy and/or there is a thunderstorm. These have been quite common over the past few weeks and we can now easily anticipate the outage in advance and always have our trusty headlamps ready (complete with solar battery charger). The only real downer to the loss of electricity is cold bucket baths which, although the weather is getting warmer, are not a pleasant experience!